Japanese Woman

Painted around 1891 during Robert Blum's residence in Tokyo and now in the New Britain Museum of American Art, Japanese Woman is one of the half-length oil studies that Blum produced as immediate responses to the Japanese figure during his Meiji-era years. The small canvas shows a young woman in three-quarter view, her dark hair drawn into a high knot and her body wrapped in a soft brown-grey kimono, the simple drawing of the costume and the directness of the modelling characteristic of the studies Blum produced from his Tokyo studio. The handling is freer than in the more highly finished Brooklyn paintings, suggesting a single sitting; the brushwork is loose and the background brushy, with all the pictorial energy concentrated in the head, the angle of the neck and the carefully observed pattern of the obi at the lower edge of the canvas.

The study entered the New Britain Museum collection through the museum's early commitment to American figure painting of the late nineteenth century and remains one of the smaller but most direct of Blum's Japanese figure pictures. It belongs to the same group of intimate Tokyo studies as the Brooklyn Museum's two Japanese Costume paintings — neither finished for exhibition nor sketched out for engraving in The Century Magazine — and offers a particularly intimate record of the working procedure Blum used in producing the Japonica illustrations and the major canvases that occupied him in the years immediately following his return to New York.